Squash Multidirectional Repeat-Lunge Test: Protocol and Scoring

A club-level player breezes through a single left-right-forward-back lunge drill in 11 seconds, faster than most of the squad, then loses game four 11-3 after getting stuck flat-footed in the back corners from the fifteenth rally onward. The drill wasn't lying. It just measured one clean rep, not what that same movement pattern looks like after eight minutes of digging balls out of both back corners. Wilkinson, Leedale-Brown, and Winter built a validated squash-specific change-of-direction test back in 2009 that nails the single-effort side of this picture, and James, Jones, and Farra's 2022 incremental court test nails the aerobic side. Neither one answers the question a fourth game actually asks: how many good lunges in a row can this player produce before the corner return turns into a stumble? That's the gap the multidirectional repeat-lunge protocol below is built to close, using court geometry squash players already train on every day.

The Squash Multidirectional Repeat-Lunge Test (SMRLT) sends a player out from the T to a marked target in each of the four court corners — front-left, back-right, front-right, back-left — lunging to touch the target and driving back to the T before the next corner is called. One circuit covers all four corners. The test repeats that circuit six times with a short, fixed recovery between reps, and it times every single circuit rather than just the fastest one. What comes out the other end isn't a single agility number; it's a fatigue curve showing how much corner-to-corner speed degrades once real neuromuscular fatigue sets in, which is exactly the part a one-off timed run can't show.

The lunge-to-corner-and-return movement pattern itself borrows directly from Wilkinson, Leedale-Brown, and Winter (2009), who built and validated a squash-specific change-of-direction speed test (SCODS) using this exact court geometry. In their study, ten competitive squash players averaged 10.90 ± 0.44 seconds on a single SCODS circuit against 12.20 ± 0.34 seconds for ten non-squash athletes — footballers and rugby players — a difference that held at p < .01. SCODS time also tracked playing standard far better than a generic agility test did: Spearman's rho of 0.77 against player ranking, versus just 0.43 for the Illinois Agility Run. That single number is a solid screen for movement quality on a clean rep. It simply isn't built to show what happens to that same movement on the sixth trip to the back corner, which is where matches are actually decided.

Jones, Williams, Kilgallen, Horobeanu, Shillabeer, Murray, and Cardinale's 2018 review of squash's performance requirements describes rallies lasting roughly 15 to 30 seconds, built from repeated maximal accelerations, decelerations, and direction changes over distances of just 3 to 6 meters — almost exactly the T-to-corner distance on a squash court. A player isn't asked to lunge once per game. They're asked to lunge, recover in under a second, and do it again dozens of times inside a single rally, then again a few seconds later once the next point starts.

James, Jones, and Farra (2022) built the other validated squash-specific field test in this space — the Squash Physical Performance Test (SPPT), an incremental on-court shuttle run to the T and corners that raises required speed by 0.19 m/s every three to four minutes until volitional exhaustion, with capillary blood lactate drawn after each stage. Across 31 elite Malaysian players (21 men ranked 42–594 in the world, 10 women ranked 7–182), the lap at which blood lactate crossed 4 mmol/L discriminated playing standard better than the final completed lap did (effect size 0.52 versus 0.35), and it correlated strongly with both change-of-direction speed and repeated-sprint ability (r = 0.79 for each). That's a genuinely useful aerobic and lactate-threshold picture, but it isn't built to isolate short-duration mechanical fatigue — the specific way a lunge's braking and push-off degrade after six or eight maximal reps, independent of aerobic conditioning. The repeat-lunge protocol below sits in that gap.

Nothing here requires equipment beyond what most clubs already have on hand, plus a roll of tape.

• Court: A standard international singles squash court, 9.75m by 6.40m — no special markings needed beyond the ones added below.
• Four corner targets: A 0.5m by 0.5m taped square on the floor in each of the four corners — front-left, front-right, back-left, back-right — positioned roughly where a player would plant to strike a shot arriving tight to the side wall.
• T marker: A single cone or a taped cross at the T, serving as the start and return point for every rep.
• Timing: Photocell gates at the T are strongly preferred over a handheld stopwatch. Reaction-time error on a stopwatch, typically 0.2–0.3s, is large relative to the gap this test is trying to detect between circuit one and circuit six.
• Footwear and surface: Standard indoor squash shoes on the test court's usual surface — grip differences between a freshly cleaned and a worn, dusty floor change lunge braking mechanics enough to matter for comparison.
• Sequence format: Decide in advance whether corners are called live (reactive) or fixed in a known order (planned), and keep that choice identical on every retest — the two draw on different decision-making demands.

Warm-up (10–12 minutes): General movement and dynamic mobility, followed by four or five build-up lunges to each corner at submaximal effort so the player has already felt the target distances before the clock starts on a maximal rep.

1. Player starts at the T, facing the front wall, in a ready split stance.
2. On the signal, sprint to the designated corner, lunge to touch inside the taped target with the racket or hand, and drive back to the T.
3. Continue through all four corners in a fixed sequence — front-left, back-right, front-right, back-left works well, since it forces a diagonal cross of the court on every second leg, closer to real rally movement than a side-to-side pattern.
4. Time from the first movement off the T to the return to the T after the fourth corner. That's one circuit.
5. Recover for 15 seconds — walk back toward the T, stay upright, no sitting or crouching — then start circuit two on the next signal.
6. Repeat for six total circuits, timing each one individually rather than only the set as a whole.

Record all six circuit times, not just the average. The gap between the fastest and slowest circuit is the entire point of the test — an athlete who holds circuit six within a few tenths of a second of circuit one is displaying something a single SCODS-style trial simply cannot show.

Score three numbers off the six circuits: the best circuit time (BCT), the mean circuit time (MCT), and a fatigue index (FI%) using the formula Fitzsimons, Dawson, Ward, and Wilkinson (1993) established for repeated-effort testing: FI% = ((sum of all six circuit times − (BCT × 6)) / (BCT × 6)) × 100. A player whose six circuits run 12.1, 12.3, 12.6, 12.9, 13.2, and 13.6 seconds has a BCT of 12.1s and an FI% of roughly 5.7% — a moderate, fairly expected decline. A sixth circuit that balloons to 15.0 seconds off that same 12.1s BCT lands closer to 12–13%, a much steeper fall-off worth flagging.

There's no independently published normative database for this exact repeat-circuit format yet, so treat general fatigue-index conventions from other repeated-effort sports — roughly under 5% as strong, 5–10% as typical, above 10% as worth investigating — as a starting reference, not a squash-validated cutoff. Wilkinson et al.'s single-trial data gives a useful sense of scale: 10.90 seconds for one circuit among competitive players is a reasonable BCT expectation here, since the geometry draws on the same movement pattern. Until larger repeat-lunge datasets exist, the most defensible read of any score is against that athlete's own prior test, not a fixed league-wide number.

A high fatigue index here usually isn't a conditioning problem in the cardiovascular sense — James et al.'s data ties aerobic capacity to the incremental SPPT climb, not a six-circuit sprint-lunge score. More often it's an eccentric and reactive-strength gap in the muscles decelerating the lunge. For players above roughly 10% FI%, prioritize single-leg eccentric work — reverse lunges, eccentric-emphasis Bulgarian split squats, lateral bounds with a controlled landing — two to three times a week, and retest after four weeks rather than a full training block.

Because the protocol times every circuit individually, look for which corner the time loss concentrates around rather than treating six numbers as one flat trend. A player who holds up fine in both front corners but fades specifically into the back corners is usually losing hip and ankle stiffness on deceleration under fatigue, not overall speed — that calls for reactive-strength and landing-mechanics work, a different fix than a player whose entire circuit slows evenly, which points more toward a genuine conditioning gap. Where the schedule allows, pair repeat-lunge testing with that same athlete's SCODS-style single-trial time; a player who's fast on one clean rep but fatigues hard across six is a different training case than a player who's slow everywhere from the first rep on.

• Swapping the recovery interval between sessions. Fifteen seconds one week and 25 the next changes the fatigue curve entirely — comparing FI% across retests depends on holding recovery fixed.
• Using a stopwatch at the T. Reaction-time error on a handheld watch, 0.2–0.3s, can be larger than the actual gap between circuit one and circuit two, burying the exact signal this test exists to find.
• Testing when the athlete is already fatigued. Running this the day after a heavy lower-body session or a full match conflates residual soreness with the mechanical fatigue the test is meant to isolate. Schedule it on a day with normal neuromuscular readiness.
• Reporting only the average of six circuits. A flat average hides whether the drop-off is gradual or a cliff at circuit five. Both the individual times and the FI% calculation matter more than one mean number ever could.
• Changing the corner sequence between test and retest. A reactive, called-live sequence and a fixed, memorized one draw on different decision-making demands. Pick one format and keep it identical for every session an athlete's data gets compared against.